It’s rather unfortunate that more and more countries seem to be fighting against crypto. A recent scenario is with Pakistan, they recently announced new and stricter measures against crypto. All these cases make me ask one question. Are we really in a democratic world? Our leaders take decisions for us even when it’s clear that the masses are ready for change. A small number of them wake up one day and decide to ban all things related to crypto and we can’t do shit about it.
This brings me to mining. In recent years miners of crypto used to make quite a reasonable amount from mining. That’s because in the past there was not a lot of competition in the mining sector and as such less competition meant more crypto for the few miners that were available. Slowly more people began to mine crypto and as such it became much harder. A miner who didn’t have sophisticated devices to mine these coins would actually be running at a loss for mining because of how the cost of these devices are high.
If you’re new to this. Basically what the miners do is that they are tasked with the Job of solving a cryptographic problems. The first person who is able to solve this is rewarded with new coins. He is also paid fees for solving the problem. Basically a cryptographic problem is a mathematical problem which the user has to find solution to as fast as possible in order to be given the incentive. The mining comes in a form of the user being able to validate transactions and helping to keep the blockchain safe.
Over the years cryptocurrency miners have employed the use of sophisticated devices to help them in mining and as such this has caused the world to go against them. These sophisticated machines are not exactly environmental friendly and as such they cause a lot of harm to the environment. According to a study that was published, China at some point had the most Bitcoin miners in their country.
sourceThis contributed to an estimated number of about 65% to 70 of the worlds miners. China had to take a decision on the activities of Bitcoin miners as this was impacting on their economy. China unlike many countries are still using coal in production of energy and as such the activities of Bitcoin miners contributed to the whole country facing major light problems.
As such the country took a stance to ban the activities of crypto in the country. This was done in anticipation of it helping to calm down on the activities of miners in the country. As expected the first few months seemed like a success as many of them had to flee to other counties to ensure they could keep their mining game. But after a few months a research reported that the activities of Bitcoin miners were surging once more. This time round it didn’t count for more than half of the worlds miners population but it did count for almost 20 to 21% percent of the number. Most of the miners took refuge in the US and in Russia and as such Russia became the worlds second largest mining base for bitcoin miners.
US reportedly is number one. Now, the mining comes with its disadvantages. You have to realize that with the mass use of energy there comes mass use of coal and probably gas in some countries. This has a very severe effect on the climate as the burning of this fossil foils causes the emissions of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide we know to be causing a lot of green hours effects. I don’t know I need to state that here. But for sure we do know how severe this can be in the future.
In Ghana we use electricity which have been motored from turbines, popularly known as hydro electric power. We have a huge damp which pumps electricity to the whole country. For the size of the country it’s particularly surprising why we use that as it’s clearly not sustainable for the whole country. The population will keep on rising and in the long run we will experience more power cuts in the future. Now look at it this way, in Ghana we don’t know of anyone who mines Bitcoin, there might be a couple of them but I bet there will only be a handle full of them.
According to research before the ban on crypto in China the amount of light that was used in China by miners was almost equal to that of the usage in Norway. Now that’s only Norway with a population of less than 10 million. Considering this number it’s a lot and thus as I said this caused a lot of electrical power cuts in China.
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As a result China wants to be able to move to a better source of serving electricity to the country. This way is supposed to help in combating the amount of carbon dioxide they emit from burning coal for electricity. So as a reason the first thing they do is to crack or fight against is cryptocurrency. They claim the mining processes send out tooo much C02 and as such if they wanna protect the environment mote they need to crack that down.
Now for once I support this fight. Am not against Bitcoin mining. Nope, what type of person will I be. I dream of mining crypto one day. The problem is the after effect of the mining. We finish mining and might even die before we start to see the effects of what we did years ago.
Elon Musk was one of the people who supported crypto and as such accepts crypto payments for his Tesla car models but he has had to stop that as the concerns raised against Bitcoin mining is alarming and if nothing is done it will affect us in year to come. We might not be alive but our children and grandchildren will get the after math of what we did. If there were only ways that didn’t emit so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere there wouldn’t be soo much concern against it.
Do you think miners should be allowed to mine. Do you know of safer ways to mine Bitcoin?
Thanks for reading.